Re: man files to text editor
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:41:41AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 10:14:54PM +0100, Jan Minar wrote:
> > Now we want the lines narrower than the default 80 characters (I guess
> > this won't work if man(1) is connected to the terminal, so the pipe is
> > vital here (that's why we use cat(1) as a pager--to force piping).
> >
> > $ env COLUMNS=70 man --pager cat --ascii foo | col -b > text-filename
>
> The '--pager cat' continues to be unnecessary here; $COLUMNS is still
> honoured. I prefer using the special-purpose $MANWIDTH for this, though.
>
> Narrowing the page does work even if man's output is a terminal.
Looking at the code, a clarification: narrowing the page works if you
use $MANWIDTH to do it, but not if you use $COLUMNS. It might be
possible to argue that this is a bug, although I'm not sure; I borrowed
that particular section of code from the implementation of man(1) in Red
Hat.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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